A family member found Betty lying face down on the floor of the modest trailer she called home. Betty lived there alone and was known in the small town she lived in as a good, hard-working woman.
She died from multiple gunshot wounds.
The murder occurred in the 1980s in rural Hardeman County Tennessee near the Mississippi state line in Grand Junction. These were tough times in tough territory. A weekend of hard-drinking after a week of hard work too often ended up in tragedy. Life was cheap.
I was a TBI Agent at the time and my primary counties of responsibility were Hardeman and Fayette counties. The Sheriffs in both counties were kind enough to give me an office that I shared with the department’s criminal investigators. Each department probably had about 8 – 10 deputies. Bolivar and Somerville, the largest cities in both counties, each had a small police department with one officer in each department assigned as an investigator. None of us got paid overtime, so we all worked long hours. There was a lot of work to be done and very few officers to do it.
Such things as S.W.A.T. Teams and Crime Scene Units existed only in big cities like Memphis and on TV.
When you are conducting a criminal investigation, it is important to try and anticipate any questions defense attorneys may ask during a court proceeding. It is part of their job to uncover mistakes made during the investigation and they are very good at it!
Once when I was testifying in a murder case a good defense attorney drilled me because I had neglected to do my job thoroughly. We were having a preliminary hearing on a suspect we had arrested for the murder. A large part of our proof rested on the information we received from an informant and during my time on the witness stand I was asked a question about the informant’s criminal record. I responded (like a nitwit) that I hadn’t had time to run a record check on the informant. The lawyer began by reminding me the organization I worked for, the TBI, was the repository for all the criminal records in the state. He then had me describe exactly how hard it would have been and how long it would have taken for me to run a record check. I, sheepishly, testified all it would have taken was a phone call. The lawyer then proceeded to “light me up” on the witness stand. He questioned why I had plenty of time to get a warrant and arrest his client for murder, but I didn’t have the time to make a phone call to check the informant’s record. Let me make it clear, I knew the informant was a convicted felon, but I had not requested his complete criminal history. Never made that particular mistake again. A good defense attorney can teach you a lot about being a good investigator!
In the case of Betty’s murder, one of the issues we were trying to resolve was where all the bullets that had been fired in the trailer came to rest. This could be important for several different reasons. The location of the fired bullets might give us some indication as to whether the victim had been surprised by someone she didn’t know, such as a burglar, or was confronted by someone she felt comfortable enough with to allow them to come into her home and get close to her. Of course, the bullets might also provide important ballistic evidence.
After reviewing the autopsy and speaking with the medical examiner it was apparent there was one bullet unaccounted for. That bullet would have been the last shot fired. The projectile entered the back of her head and exited through her face.
Chief Cecil “Red” Wilson with the Grand Junction Police Department and myself returned to the crime scene, Betty’s trailer, once again to try and find the missing spent round. We looked very carefully throughout the entire trailer, but we could not find a bullet hole.
We were just about to declare it a mystery bullet when Red had an idea. As was stated earlier, Betty was found lying face down on the floor. After looking at the autopsy, it was evident the bullet we were looking for traveled straight through her skull from the back of her head. There was a large blood spot on the carpet where her body was found. The carpet was some kind of indoor/outdoor material, sort of like astroturf. But there was no hole in the carpet that we could see.
Red and I stood around scratching our head for a minute, trying to figure what had happened. Then without saying a word, Red reached down and grabbed a corner of the carpet and pulled it back. This move exposed the trailer floor and sure enough, there was a hole in the floor that looked like a bullet hole!
We still didn’t have the bullet. Once again, without saying anything, Red walked into the bedroom and came out with a coat hanger. He straightened the coat hanger and ran it through the hole until it hit something solid. Since I had been absolutely no help to Red up to this point, I volunteered to crawl underneath the trailer and see what the coat hanger was hitting. It turned out to be the underpinning for the trailer.
It was dark underneath the trailer and I couldn’t really see very well. To be honest, I was a little preoccupied looking for snakes, too. When I reached up and felt the coat hanger, I just ran my hand all the way down the hanger until I hit the cross tie. My hand landed on the bullet.
After being shot several times, Betty apparently fell to the floor and at that point, her killer shot her in the back of the head. It looked like an execution.
We quickly developed a prime suspect and Sheriff Delphus Hicks and I spent several hours talking to him on more than one occasion. At one point we took a lengthy written statement from him. The statement was 11 handwritten, legal size pages long. It was full of lies.
It is important to remember in order to convict a person of a crime you must prove they committed every element that particular crime! Sheriff Hicks and I had done a good of proving the suspect was a liar. But his statement did not prove he was a murderer.
I don’t remember if Chief Wilson had much formal police training in crime scene investigation or not, and I don’t care. No matter what kind of investigative aids science produces, common sense and good investigative technique will always be important. This incident is just one more example of how valuable good old basic police work can be.
The author, Jim Leach, is a graduate of the Tennessee Government Executive Institute.
